Zed

by Jason McIntyre

  In the back, as they sped north of town, Tom said, “Why didn’t you tell me? About your dad?”

  “Ah, you’re not from here. I wanted to get to know you and not have you worried about my dad breathing down your neck.” In the driver’s seat, the chief gave a sideways smirk. Farrah smiled too.

  “So,” Tom said. “I missed the boat, huh?”

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “All this craziness. My food poisoning. I missed out on hanging with you before I leave. And I guess you’re back with Mike now...”

  “Mike?” Farrah let out a laugh. “I’m not getting back with Mike. There’s only one guy on this whole island more screwed up than you. And it’s Mikey Dean. And he knows it.”

  She looked out the window at the dark town and the trees as they sped along. “But he told me what happened. I think he’s sorry. He’d be the first to admit how messed up he is. Whole family is, really. Mom’s a workaholic, Dad’s been laid off from every company around. They fight all the time. I think it’s rubbed off on him.”

  She looked back at Tom. “Don’t worry. I get it,” she said, and took his hand from the seat with a warm squeeze. “And I think it hit too close to home for Mikey.”

  36

  Satisfied that Mary was okay at the Deans’ place with everyone else, Zeke bled into the crowd. They parted for him, wary of the man they thought of as the town retard, a guy who, on this night, looked the same as he always did—even though, inside, he was a whole new man.

  Zeke’s mind was starting to falter. It was late. He was tired. He knew that after a sleep it might all slip away. It was beginning and he worried he might lose his ability to reason soundly even in the next hour or so.

  But what he did know at the moment is that Karen Banatyne was not locked in the dining room at Ocean View like the chief thought. Like Tom thought.

  His first week after getting dropped unceremoniously into the fray at Ocean View, Mary and Ingy had been playing in there and found a door under the rug at the head of the table. They called Zeke in and Zeke helped them get the trap door open. He saw that it went down quite a ways into the deep, dark earth. Fidela had found them and shooed them out of that room, worried that Nurse Karen would find out. Her English seemed awfully good that day when she took them in the hall and made them promise they wouldn’t tell a soul.

  Fidela was a kind woman. Zeke had always liked her and thought her more in tune with the guests than almost any other of the employees Karen had had over the last two years—except for maybe Tom.

  Zeke remembered now that Fidela had used the word tunnel when she talked about that trap door and Zeke knew two things. That tunnel was probably part of the reason the dining room was almost never used and that there were tunnels all over the island. With his daddy—and with others—he’d even been inside some of the tunnels. There might be a dozen or more, some so wide a train could fit down them.

  He made no assumptions. Now that his thinker-bottle was full and polished again, he was smart enough to know there were things he would never know and never understand. He was part of the human race, perpetually in the dark. And one of the things Zeke didn’t know is where that tunnel under the head of the dining room table came out.

  And he didn’t care. Not at the moment.

  He made a best guess though. If he’d heard right, Karen had taken a handful of those submarines. He didn’t know if she really had. He supposed that she might have realized she’d been close to getting caught and, if three of those pills knocked out Mary and his memory, or made him go off to sleep as soundly as a newborn, then maybe ten times as many would give Karen the big sleep.

  Zeke drove around on the surrounding streets of Lannen Lane, half-expecting to find her passed out in someone’s yard. Then he went as far as the big Banatyne home on the avenue. Sure enough, one light in the kitchen shone as he approached. He felt like he should tell the chief, but if he did, he might lose her. Karen might be packing a bag and heading for the ferry. One last ferry would leave for the mainland tonight at 10:30. This late in tourist season they added a late night trip through the week to ensure visitors found their way to connecting flights and back to their homes. DC loved their tourists—relied on them—but come late August, there was a general feeling among townies that enough was enough.

  Zeke would stop Karen before she joined the tourists on their slow ride home. As far as he was concerned, Karen had abused them all by forcing those pills on them. But it was Mary most of all. Zeke would make sure that Karen paid for giving those subs to his beloved Mary.

  He parked and went to the house, padding through the damp grass. The rain had mostly let up but a fine mist spat in Zeke’s face. He avoided the walkway and instead, went around to the side and looked in the lit kitchen window. Then he saw light thrown on some outside trees. He went to its source, the bathroom window, where he peered in and saw Karen. His heart jumped, but he realized she couldn’t see him. Inside a lit room when it’s dark outside, the window usually looks plain black, as if a sheet is draped over it. It looked the same at the house north of the creek where Mr. Banatyne had been... eaten up.

  Nurse Karen was making a heck of a mess in the bathroom. She pulled every bottle and bar of soap out from under the sink. She did the same in a well-stocked medicine cabinet and finally found a bottle she was looking for. Then she left and he heard her moving through the house. She came out the back door and Zeke stayed far back, only watching from behind a large, but well-manicured grove of miniature cedars.

  Karen looked drunk. She staggered with that bottle in her hand as she made it around to the back of the house. She tugged dreamily and lazily on the doors leading into her basement. It was the opening through which she’d made Zeke first haul out the restraint bed—and then her poor husband rolled up in that pink and white blanket.

  Down Karen went, disappearing into nothingness through the mouth of her basement. Zeke came out from the bushes. His mind was starting to cloud over. He needed to get back to the hot pool for another treatment. And, even more important than that, he needed to get back and make sure Mary was okay, make sure Mary wasn’t scared.

  But he also needed to make sure Karen wouldn’t be leaving this island. Chief wanted to talk to her and Zeke was going to help.

  He took his axe, brought from his truck. And he followed her down into the tomb.

  Inside, about halfway down the stairs, he heard the crackle, the clang of metal and saw the light flickering up the sidewalls of the stairway.

  At the bottom, he turned the corner and set foot on the cool dirt floor. Karen’s back was to him. She stood toe-tapping with her hands on her hips. She watched a fire blaze in the belly of the big coal furnace, the grate door removed. Scattered at her feet were file folders and six drawers. Zeke thought they looked about the same size as the openings in the cabinets at the north house. The empty filing cabinets.

  “Hi,” he said, and she whirled at him, so sudden and fast she fell over.

  “Zeke, oh my goodness,” she said. “You startled me, you nincompoop.” She said it playfully, but Zeke smelled her, even from here. She stunk of sweat and stress. Her face burned red, either with worry or with the roaring fire where some of those files had already started burning. She pawed at more folders, trying to grapple with them. She threw a bundle toward the fire. Desperation showed in every twitch of her muscles.

  “Are you tired?” Zeke asked, stepping forward into the guts of the low-ceilinged basement and clutching the axe, much as he did when he’d confronted Tom.

  “So tired, buddy,” Karen said. She spoke in her sales voice, coating everything with sugar, Mary used to call it. “I’m just going to tidy up down here and get to bed. H-how are you?”

  She next reached for the bottle that lay in one pile of disheveled papers and files. But Zeke reached out with the axe. One strong arm extended the axe until the rusted blade touched the plastic bottle. He used it like a hockey stick to bat the bottle away from Karen’s reaching
hand.

  He went to it and picked it up. Only the fire light lit them and the bottle.

  Zeke could barely read. But he knew labels. His daddy had taught him this one. Ipecac. It had the same red cross he remembered from Daddy’s own medicine cabinet at home. Zeke knew this one. It was for poisoning. If y’ever drink the wrong thing, m’boy, Daddy had said, you chase ‘er with this and up everything’ll come. Tastes like sin, stronger’n tobacco. But you’ll empty your guts and all the bad stuff’ll come with it.

  Zeke held the bottle.

  “I need that,” Karen said, desperation cloying in her voice. “Come on, champ, give it to Nurse Karen. It’s my medicine. I took some pills and I need some more medicine to help me.”

  “Was it them bad pills you gave Mary and me?” Zeke said. “Smitty and Dar and Ingy too?”

  “That’s right,” Karen said, and she bit her lip back from what looked like pain. Her stomach rose in a heavy hitch and she grimaced. Her eyes sagged and she looked like the lights were going out upstairs. Maybe Karen’s thinker-bottle was getting a crack in it, Zeke thought. Or maybe those pills would put a split right through it. He had no idea how many she’d swallowed.

  “So just gimme the bottle, Zeke ol’ pal,” she said, her voice cracking. “And I’ll be right as rain.”

  “Chief Birkhead knows,” Zeke said, making no motion to hand over the bottle. He circled her and she pawed at the dirt and papers beneath her, unable to stand. She tried but kept falling back down on her rump. Her doctor’s whites were grey and smeared brown in the dim light. Her face matched. Her lipstick was nearly all worn off and her long fingernails were chipped and broken. Zeke thought her husband’s long nails at the end. He shivered.

  “Yuh,” he said. “Knows about Roundtree and the tests. Remember those? And pretty soon, Tom’s taking him to see Mr. Banatyne.”

  Karen spat in anger. “That hopeless shit. I knew I couldn’t trust him to hold up his end. He’s gonna be a lousy businessman.” She was talking to the room now, or maybe the dirt floor, but not to Zeke. To Karen, Zeke was still the town retard and he couldn’t understand one lick of this. “Doesn’t matter though. Not a bit. Christopher is sick. Anyone can see that. I didn’t do anything but love him and nurse him. I tried. It’s everything else. All this—”

  She picked up another pile of papers and threw them in the direction of the churning fire inside the boiler. That fire was beginning to ebb.

  They missed entirely and landed in a generous arc of white and off-white debris, flapping as they settled on each other and in the grey dirt.

  Karen let out an exhale of defeat. She was fading fast. Her eyes closed entirely. “Come on, Zee, old buddy,” she said, he voice languishing. “Give Mommy the bottle of medicine, okay? Help Nurse Karen out, okay?” Then she snapped it out in an angry shout. “OKAY?”

  “I don’t like that nickname, anymore,” Zeke said. “You call me Zed. Like Mary does.”

  37

  “I’m not going back in that house,” Tom said when the chief stuck his car into park on the long gravel driveway of the house north of the creek. He didn’t care if he looked like a pansy to this girl in the back seat beside him, in front of her father or not. In front of the chief of police for this whole crazy island. He just didn’t care.

  Tom Mason was not going back in that house.

  “That’s fine. But is he okay in there? I mean, am I walking into an ambush? That sort of thing doesn’t happen in Dovetail, but I gotta ask. I gotta know. Is he... mentally... okay?”

  Tom looked off at the dark windows of the house. His third visit to this place and he was shaking like a leaf. In only three times to this place, just glancing in its direction now had the power to make him shrivel up, void his bladder and bawl like a baby. He was holding himself off these things as best he could. He squeezed Farrah’s hand. “No,” he said, finally. “Mr. Banatyne is in there. But he is definitely not okay.”

  Chief took a breath. “You can’t tell me what’s happened?” Chief Birkhead never went into situations he didn’t fully understand, but he knew the Banatynes. They were plain people, regular folk. Lauded by mostly themselves and tangled in some business he wouldn’t consider on the up and up. Whatever happened in here had scared the kid but was just that: a scare. Nothing convinced Chief that Banatyne was in there with a machete or a series of booby traps.

  “It wouldn’t make any sense,” Tom said. “I told you. You have to see it for yourself.” Tom’s voice cracked at the end. But he realized he should probably make the chief as prepared as he could. “He’s in the back room. All the way at the back, down the hallway, last door on the... uh... right-hand side. But Zeke and me, we couldn’t get the lights to work. You’ll be in the dark.”

  The chief got out and bent at the waist to look back into the cruiser. “You stay here. Both of you. Farrah, you know how to call Dep if anything goes left that should go right.”

  “I do, Dad. You’ve only told me eight hundred times.”

  Chief Birkhead drew his weapon, one of only a handful of times in his career that he’d done so. With his other hand he tested the flashlight. Then he slowly made his way across the wide front yard and around to the side of the house. Tom’s heart beat in his neck. The sound of thrumming blood filled his ears. Farrah said something but he didn’t hear it. He stopped breathing for a moment.

  Farrah and Tom watched the picture window of the living room through the cruiser's buggy windshield.

  It seemed like forever. But finally, the house lit up from the inside. It scared them both and they jumped, grabbing at each other and holding each other’s bare arms. Farrah let out a squeal. “You’re scaring the shit out of me!” she scolded. Part playful, but mostly dead serious. Her dad was in there. And though she trusted her old man to keep his wits and be on top of any situation, it was stressful to see him doing something way more serious than the rest of his day job. And the fact that Tom wouldn’t say anything about what her dad may find inside the house, here in the darkness of late evening, only made her worry about the worst.

  Tom saw it first. He tensed. Then, instinctively, so did Farrah.

  It was movement. And it was a thick, heavy shadow moving through the house.

  Then it was the tell-tale outline of her father, the chief. He was checking out the living room, leaving the safety of the well-lit hallway. He was as plain as day, as if this was a drive-in movie and Farrah and Tom were only two horny teenagers pulled from their make out session in the back seat of Daddy’s car by a loud scene. Only there was no sound at this movie.

  Just crickets. A wind in some tall grass and then the trees. And Chief Birkhead now leaving the living room after having a look at the two tall (and empty) filing cabinets.

  More silence. No visual on the chief. He was hidden from view. But then, another light flicked on, somewhere in the back of the house. Tom and Farrah only saw it down a portion of the hallway visible through the big plate glass at the front.

  More agonizing silence. Tom thought of those tiny spiders. And the glistening white critters that didn’t look quite like maggots, didn’t really look like anything he’d ever seen before. He grew an itch in his back, thinking of them crawling across his skin after bursting out of Chris Banatyne’s swollen face and belly, then scouring the floorboards and up his sandals... before he finally ran and jumped in the icy creek.

  Then Chief Birkhead was coming back down the hall. He was in a hurry. Tom thought the worst. Tom thought he was infested now too. Freaking out because they were in his hair and going down his collar. Maybe even finding their way into his undershorts and up over the tops of his socks.

  Birkhead flew out the side door, letting the screen bang loudly. The noise of that burst the silence like a shattered bulb. He crossed the yard and the beams of his cruiser. He was at the open window of his driver’s side. “How long ago were you in there?” the chief asked, impatiently.

  “I-I dunno,” Tom said in a heavy stutter. “Maybe two hours ago?
I have no idea what time it is. Why?”

  “There’s no one here.”

  38

  Zeke circled Karen in the dank basement. The fire in the belly of the great boiler had ceded. The light had gone out of the space, shrinking it to only the opening on the steel tub where cinders burned and the odd flake of burned paper floated in the air. That small light only showed an eight-foot radius plus one support beam, plus Karen, plus Zeke.

  Karen finally opened her eyes. She puffed breath. Her chest heaved with each draw in and each release out. This was hard for her. And she pleaded to Zeke—of all people in the world—to end it, to make it stop, to ease her suffering.

  “How many ‘vitamins’ did you swallow, Nurse Karen?” His mind was fading from the bright, sharp instrument the hot pool and the tiny krill-critters had built, but he knew what sarcasm was, even if he didn’t know the name for such an idea. He hit both the word vitamins and Karen’s phony title with gobs of the stuff. Sarcasm. What a delightful turnabout for the likes of Karen Banatyne.

  “How many?” Karen repeated.

  “Yeah. How many pills? How many submarines that none of us ever needed but you fed us to keep us sleeping. To keep us from remembering anything.”

  “Dunno, Zeke,” she said, too tired to shout. “Lots, I think. Too many.” Only enough energy in her voice to blow the words out, not really say them from her chest.

  “Did you think the chief would believe you? Believe that you wanted to hurt yourself? Maybe so he’d stand back and you could get away? You wanted to come here and burn up all this stuff, right?”